When I was in college about 10 years ago, I was lucky enough to take an anthropology class with Dr. Fisher, one of the authors of the study discussed in the article. Suffice it to say, she was one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic professors I’ve ever had at Rutgers.

I’m looking at my extremely messy desk right now and I have a free iTunes bottle cap. Since I managed to OD on Beck’s Guero this past weekend (oh, good memories associated with it), I have the extremely pressing question of What new music I should download?

I can’t give the winner much, but I’m sure the bragging rights will be enough…

This is what the NJ Turnpike looked like going southbound at about 4pm today around exit 7….check out the northbound lanes…

This traffic was not caused by an accident or weather…it was simply because there were too many people on the road. And yes, the backups occurred in both directions and I managed to hit it both ways…so my usual 4 hour drive was extended to 5.5 hours. Fun.

Apparently, the folks over at Philly.com are trying to promote the blogging thing.

Which is all well and good, I suppose, but apparently this blog run by reporter-cum-blogger Dan Rubin is supposed to cover local bloggers and local events. However, if you take a good look at his blogroll he’s got the typical bloggers and, as of today, a grand total of 5 Philly area bloggers (and that’s if you include the Daily News blog and Eschaton).

Add to the fact that the tone of some of the current blog posts aren’t exactly about local blogging or local bloggers covering issues.

Color me underwhelmed. I’m actuallly a little pained by this, since if Mr. Rubin takes the time and effort to run a strong, interesting Philly area blog he’ll get readers.

I know he could do better coverage of local blogging. Let’s see if he’s up to the task.

Great. So, if you’re not using the trust mafia, your site does not have a green shield displayed in the browser.

The reason why this practice is wrong is that I, as a site owner now have to pay money to a company to verify my site. Unlike, say, SSL, where I don’t have to pay an SSL provider unless I want them to do the work for me.

There was a thread today and yesterday on the Full Disclosure mailing list about the MS Spyware beta and how it unfortunately has an inadvertent security hole. I’m posting the explanation here because I think it’s pretty interesting.

You may or may not know that Windows applications often use the registry to store information about where to find applications within their file system. Due to the way in which Windows handles filenames, situations where this information is stored in an unquoted fashion, can leave the application open to an attack commonly referred to as the “Program.exe trick”.

As you know, it’s quite common to have files and/or directories with spaces in the name (e.g. C:Program Files). Windows is unique in that it essentially doesn’t exactly know what it’s doing if the command isn’t quoted and contains spaces. For example look at the following command:

c:program fileswindows media playerwmplayer

If unquoted, Windows tries the following:

1st try

Execute: c:program.exe

Arg1: fileswindows

Arg2: media

Arg3: playerwmplayer

2nd try

Execute: “c:program fileswindows.exe”

Arg1: media

Arg2: playerwmplayer

3rd try

Execute: “c:program fileswindows media”

Arg1: playerwmplayer

4th try

Execute: “c:program fileswindows media playermwplayer.exe”

Well in the case of MS AntiSpyware (and hundreds of other applications), AntiSpyware, it starts up by executing “AntiSpywareMain.exe” which in turn displays a nice splash screen, performs some other misc activities before calling the gsasDtServ.exe. The problem is that the execution of gsasDtServ.exe is unquoted, while the app tries to execute c:program filesmicrosoft antispywaregsasDtServ.exe, if c:program.exe exists, it will be executed instead and MS Antispyware never actually gets loaded.

With XPSP2, the OS will actually warn you about files like c:Program.bat, or c:Program.exe, but not of c:program filesinternet.exe.

Sadly, this isn’t uncommon and when I tested this on my system the first time, 7 applications were executed over a 48 hour period. Try it for yourself. My Program.exe logs the executing user and command args to c:program.log.